Eddie Van Halen

• 1. Introduction

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  Eddie Van Halen summed up his whole life in a few sentences at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in 2015. "We came here with approximately $50 and a piano, and we didn't speak the language. Now look where we are. If that's not the American dream, what is?"

  The man asking that question became one of rock's most imitated guitarists, yet he never learned to read music. He did not buy his most famous instrument. He built it from parts, and some of those parts were non-functional decoration.

  This documentary follows that arc. How did a family of newcomers end up with a piano in Pasadena, and why did a boy trained for the keyboard pick up a guitar? What did his famous technique really owe to other players? And what did a life spent at that volume cost the man who lived it?

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• 2. Pasadena Piano

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  Edward Lodewijk Van Halen was born in Amsterdam on the 26th of January 1955. His father, Jan, was a Dutch jazz pianist, clarinetist and saxophonist who worked for the Dutch Air Force. Jan also played with local acts such as Jos Cleber and Snip en Snap. His mother, Eugenia, born Van Beers, was an Indonesian woman from Rangkasbitung on the island of Java, then part of the Dutch East Indies.

  After six years in Indonesia, the family settled in Amsterdam and later in Nijmegen. In 1962, after being mistreated in the 1950s for their mixed-race marriage, Jan and Eugenia moved the family to the United States. They chose Pasadena, California, to be near relatives.

  Money was tight. Jan worked as a janitor to add to what he earned playing venues such as The Continental Club, La Miranda Country Club and The Alpine Haus. When his band was a member short, Eddie sometimes filled in on bass. Eugenia worked as a maid.

  At school, Eddie and his brother Alex were treated as "minority" students because English was not their first language. They were bullied by white classmates. Piano lessons began at age six, and the boys commuted from Pasadena to San Pedro in Los Angeles to study with an elderly teacher named Stasys Kalvaitis.

  Eddie never learned to read music. He watched recitals of Bach or Mozart and then improvised his own version. Between 1964 and 1967, he won first place in the annual piano competition at Long Beach City College.

  Their parents wanted classical pianists. The boys wanted rock, and they were drawn to British Invasion bands such as the Beatles and the Dave Clark Five. At first Alex took up guitar while Eddie bought a drum kit. Then Eddie heard his brother play the drum solo from the Surfaris' "Wipe Out" and handed over the kit. He started learning electric guitar himself, practicing around the house with the instrument strapped on, or for hours in his room with the door locked.

  Their first band was called The Broken Combs, with three other boys. They played at lunchtime at Hamilton Elementary School in Pasadena. Eddie later pointed to that fourth-grade performance as the moment he wanted to be a professional musician.

  Cream's "I'm So Glad" on the album Goodbye struck him as "mind-blowing". He once claimed he had learned almost all of Eric Clapton's Cream solos note for note. "I've always said Eric Clapton was my main influence," he said, "but Jimmy Page was actually more the way I am, in a reckless-abandon kind of way." That recklessness would soon be tested in clubs across Los Angeles.

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• 3. The Starwood Night

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  Mammoth was the name Eddie and Alex gave their band in 1972. Two years later, David Lee Roth joined as lead singer, and the group officially became Van Halen. It turned into a staple of the Los Angeles scene, playing well-known clubs such as the Whisky a Go Go.

  A 1976 show at The Starwood in California changed their course. The band opened for UFO, and Kiss bassist Gene Simmons was in the audience. "I was waiting backstage by the third song," he said. He asked about their plans, and they answered, "There is a yogurt manufacturer that is going to invest in us."

  Simmons begged them not to go that route. He invited them to record demos at Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village, New York City, and signed them to his company. The sessions produced early versions of songs including "Runnin' with the Devil".

  Simmons then pitched the band to Kiss manager Bill Aucoin and Kiss frontman Paul Stanley. Both dismissed the idea. Stanley later said he "rejected Van Halen to protect Kiss", and that the band tried to make Simmons drop them to "keep Gene in check". Discouraged, Simmons ripped up the contract. He "let them go", feeling he might have held them back.

  The following year, Warner Records offered Van Halen a recording contract. Their 1978 album Van Halen reached No. 19 on the Billboard pop chart. It was one of rock's most commercially successful debuts and is highly regarded as both a heavy metal and a hard rock record. By the early 1980s, Van Halen ranked among the most successful rock acts of the time.

  The long-term numbers are large. In 2019, the Recording Industry Association of America placed the band 20th among best-selling artists, with 56 million album sales in the United States and more than 100 million worldwide. Van Halen charted 13 number-one hits on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart. The band won the 1992 Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance with Vocals for the album For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. VH1 placed the group seventh among the top 100 hard rock artists, and in 2007 Van Halen entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

  Some of Eddie's most famous work, though, came from a keyboard, or from sessions under someone else's name.

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• 4. Keys and Collaborations

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  Paul Stanley remembered a visit that Eddie paid to a Kiss recording session. Eddie was "blown away" by the song "Creatures of the Night" and said he wanted to get into playing keyboards. Stanley was puzzled by the interest. It ended up producing "Jump".

  A rumor also circulated that Eddie nearly replaced guitarist Ace Frehley after Frehley left Kiss in 1982, and that Simmons talked him out of it. Neither Stanley nor Eddie remembers it happening.

  The album 1984 went five-times Platinum a year after its release. "Jump" was its lead single and the band's only No. 1 pop hit. It brought a Grammy nomination, despite David Lee Roth's reservations about Eddie playing keyboard instead of guitar.

  Keyboards ran through Eddie's writing for years. "And the Cradle Will Rock..." was his first recorded keyboard work, written and played on a Wurlitzer electric piano through a Marshall amp. The riff for "Dancing in the Street" on Diver Down came from a Minimoog. "Jump" and "I'll Wait" were written on an Oberheim OB-Xa. "Dreams", "Why Can't This Be Love" and "Love Walks In" used an Oberheim OB-8. He also wrote "When It's Love" and "Right Now" on keyboards.

  On stage, the arrangement shifted over the years. During the 5150 and OU812 tours, Eddie played keyboard parts live while Sammy Hagar handled guitar. From the For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge tour onward, Eddie played guitar all night. Touring keyboardist Alan Fitzgerald played the keyboard parts backstage until 2012.

  Outside the band, Eddie worked on film soundtracks with Alex, including The Wild Life in 1984, Twister in 1996 and Sacred Sin in 2006. He also collaborated with Gene Simmons, Nicolette Larson, Queen guitarist Brian May, Sammy Hagar, Black Sabbath, Roger Waters, Toto guitarist Steve Lukather and LL Cool J. He turned up on screen too, in the video for Frank Sinatra's "L.A. Is My Lady", in an episode of Cafe Americain starring his then-wife Valerie Bertinelli, and in an episode of Two and a Half Men.

  The most famous guest spot came in 1982, on Michael Jackson's album Thriller. Pete Townshend of The Who was unavailable for the song "Beat It" and recommended Eddie. After meeting Quincy Jones and Jackson, Eddie was unsure what a guitarist could add to a pop song. So he played along with the track and ended up restructuring it before adding the solo.

  He described the moment in a 2012 CNN interview. "I listened to the song, and I immediately go, 'Can I change some parts?'" Assembling the new arrangement took the engineer about ten minutes. Eddie then improvised two solos over it.

  He warned Jackson that he had changed the middle section of the song. In his own mind, Jackson would either have his bodyguards throw him out or like it. Jackson liked it. As Eddie recalled, Jackson thanked him for caring enough about the song to make it better rather than just blazing a solo. Eddie was so pleased that he refused payment.

  The twist came on the charts. Thriller reached No. 1 and pushed Eddie's own band's album 1984 down to No. 2.

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• 5. Tapping and Tone

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  "Eruption", a 1978 instrumental solo, finished second in a Guitar World readers' poll of the "100 Greatest Guitar Solos". It showed off tapping, a technique that uses both the left and right hands on the neck to play rapid arpeggios. Guitar World readers also voted Eddie number one in a poll of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time". In 2023, Rolling Stone ranked him fourth in its list of the "250 Greatest Guitarists of All Time".

  He popularized tapping but did not invent it. According to MusicRadar, Steve Hackett, lead guitarist with Genesis in the 1970s, is widely credited with inventing two-handed tapping. Hackett was an influence on Eddie. Asked about it, Hackett said: "Eddie and I have never spoken about it, but yes, he has credited me with tapping... Eddie is a fine player, of course, and he's the one who named the technique."

  George Lynch gave another account. He said he and Eddie once watched Harvey Mandel tap at the Starwood in the 1970s.

  Eddie traced his own idea to Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin. He said he got it watching Page play the "Heartbreaker" solo back in 1971. Page was doing a pull-off to an open string, and Eddie wondered, "what if I use my finger as the nut and move it around?" In his words, "I just kind of took it and ran with it."

  Tapping also changed how the guitar was held. Eddie held a patent, which expired in 2005, for a flip-out support that attaches to the rear of an electric guitar. It lets a player lay the guitar with its face upward, much like a piano.

  Then there is the "brown sound". In a 1985 Guitar World interview, Eddie called it "basically a tone, a feeling that I'm always working at," and said that "It comes from the person." In a June 2015 Billboard interview, he gave a different meaning. He said he had really been describing the sound of Alex's snare drum, which he thought sounded as if his brother were beating on a log. "It's very organic. So it wasn't my brown sound. It was Alex's."

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• 6. Frankenstein Workshop

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  A Teisco Del Rey bought from Sears and Roebuck was Eddie's first guitar. When he turned professional, his father bought him a Gibson Les Paul. Eddie swapped the original P90 pickup at the bridge for a humbucker so it would sound like Eric Clapton. He briefly used a Gibson ES-335, again because of Clapton, but damaged its body while modifying it. It was later stripped for parts on other home-built projects.

  An Ibanez Destroyer carried much of the debut album. Eddie first used it in natural wood, then painted it white and altered its electronics. After the recording, he took a chainsaw to it and cut a deep V into the bottom. In the V he set hand-carved teeth, two eyehooks and chains, and nicknamed it "The Shark". The changes hurt the tone, so he played it in that form only briefly. He kept the guitar for the rest of his life, and it appears on the cover of Women and Children First.

  His best-known instrument was the one built from parts, commonly called the Frankenstrat or Frankenstein. According to his son Wolfgang, Eddie never named it, but the case said "Frankenstein", which Wolfgang considers official. The maple neck cost $80. The ash body cost $50 because the wood had a knot in it. The tremolo bridge came from a 1958 Fender Stratocaster and was later replaced with a Floyd Rose.

  In its most common form, the guitar had one working pickup, a Gibson PAF taken from his ES-335 and potted in paraffin wax to prevent feedback. A non-functional selector switch and loose wires filled the middle pickup slot. A red single-coil that did nothing sat in the neck position. The volume knob was relabeled "TONE". The guitar first appeared on the cover of the band's debut, painted white with black stripes. In 1979 it was recoated in Schwinn red bicycle paint.

  Before and during Van Halen II, Eddie built a second guitar, painted black and yellow, nicknamed "The Bumblebee Guitar". After the death of Dimebag Darrell Abbott, it was donated to Abbott's longtime partner, Rita Haney, and was buried with him in his casket.

  On "Little Guitars" on Diver Down, he played a mini-Les Paul by Nashville luthier David Petschulat, who pitched it to him during a tour stop in Nashville. That is the only Van Halen recording the instrument appears on. He later bought a second mini-Les Paul, dark wine-red with a thicker body and full-size humbuckers.

  The business side began in 1982, when he launched the Baretta model with Kramer, a partnership that lasted a decade. In the mid-1980s he bought a Steinberger GL2T, whose switch-operated vibrato can be heard on the 5150 album. From 1991 to 1995 he worked with Ernie Ball / Music Man on the EVH model, later renamed the Axis. Peavey followed in 1996 with the EVH Wolfgang, and that relationship ran until 2004. Eddie then joined Fender, first with Edward-endorsed Art Series guitars under the Charvel brand and later with the EVH brand.

  Around 1989, Ernie Ball launched 5150 EVH strings, gauged 9, 11, 15, 24, 32 and 40. Typical sets then were 9, 11, 16, 24, 32 and 42. From 1993 to 2004 he developed the 5150 series of amplifiers and cabinets with Peavey. Fender produced the first EVH-branded amplifiers in 2007, and in 2009 it released a Wolfgang-inspired guitar line.

  In 2006, Fender made the "Frank 2", a near-perfect production replica of the original. Eddie later said that, shown both guitars in a blind comparison, he had some trouble picking out his homemade original. His pickups included 1970s Mighty Mites by Seymour Duncan, which copied DiMarzio Super Distortion pickups, and a Gibson PAF that Duncan rewound in 1978. He also held two further patents, for a tension-adjusting tailpiece and an ornamental headstock design.

  For the 2012 tour, he played a black Wolfgang USA with an ebony fretboard. For 2015, he used a white Wolfgang USA designed by Chip Ellis, fitted with a custom kill switch.

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• 7. Body and Family

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  At a Van Halen concert in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1980, Eddie met the actress Valerie Bertinelli. They married in California eight months later, on the 11th of April 1981. Their son, Wolfgang, was born in 1991. Bertinelli filed for divorce in Los Angeles in 2005, after four years of separation, and it was finalized in 2007.

  The next year Eddie proposed to Janie Liszewski, an actress and stuntwoman who was then his publicist. They married in 2009 at his Studio City estate. Wolfgang and Bertinelli attended. Alex, an ordained minister, officiated the wedding. He also officiated Bertinelli's own remarriage in 2011.

  Eddie's health was troubled for most of his life. He began smoking and drinking at 12 and said he eventually needed alcohol to function. He struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction, entered rehabilitation in 2007, and said in a 2015 interview that he had been sober since 2008.

  In 1995, he was diagnosed with chronic avascular necrosis. Years of acrobatic stage performances and crashes had left lingering injuries, and he had hip replacement surgery in 1999.

  Treatment for tongue cancer began in 2000. Surgery removed roughly a third of his tongue, and he was declared cancer-free in 2002. He blamed the habit of holding guitar picks in his mouth. In 2015 he said: "I used metal picks - they're brass and copper - which I always held in my mouth, in the exact place where I got the tongue cancer." He called this his own theory, but said the doctors told him it was possible.

  In 2012, emergency surgery for severe diverticulitis forced the postponement of tour dates in Japan. In 2019 he was hospitalized after five years of battling throat cancer. After his death, Bertinelli also mentioned lung cancer in an Instagram post.

  Eddie died of a stroke at Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California, on the 6th of October 2020. He was 65. With him were his wife Janie, his son Wolfgang, who was then the band's bassist, Bertinelli, and Alex. Wolfgang confirmed the news on social media later that same day.

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• 8. Afterglow

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  In February 2017, Eddie donated 75 guitars from his personal collection to the Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation, a program that supplies instruments to students in low-income schools.

  After his death, some of his childhood landmarks in Pasadena became memorials where fans could pay their respects. At the 2020 Billboard Music Awards, former collaborators gave speeches as a tribute. They included Jack White of The White Stripes, G. E. Smith, Charlie Benante of Anthrax and Dierks Bentley. Wolfgang shared personal photos of himself with his father.

  On the 10th of October 2020, Saturday Night Live played a clip of Eddie performing with G. E. Smith. It came from a February 1987 show hosted by Valerie Bertinelli.

  The Pasadena Library offered archives and documents related to him in 2020. The collection held several albums, photographs by Neil Zlozower and several CDs. The library also uploaded his albums to Hoopla.

  On the 16th of November 2020, Wolfgang told The Howard Stern Show that Van Halen would not continue as a band. "You can't have Van Halen without Eddie Van Halen," he said.

  The Red Hot Chili Peppers paid their own tribute with the song "Eddie", on their 2022 album Return of the Dream Canteen.

  In 2025, Sotheby's announced it would auction one of Eddie's custom-built 1982 Kramer guitars in October. The guitar was set to headline the auction house's pop-culture collectibles "Grails Week", with an estimate of $2-3 million.

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